Papers on Parliament Lectures in the Senate Occasional Lecture Series, and other papers Number 70 December 2019 Published and printed by the Department of the Senate Parliament House, Canberra ISSN 1031–976X print version ISSN 2206–3579 online version Published by the Department of the Senate, 2019 ISSN 1031–976X print version ISSN 2206–3579 online version Papers on Parliament is edited and managed by the Procedure and Research Section, Department of the Senate. Edited by Ruth Barney All editorial inquiries should be made to: Director Procedure and Research Section Department of the Senate PO Box 6100 Parliament House CANBERRA ACT 2600 Telephone: (02) 6277 3232 Email: [email protected] To order copies of Papers on Parliament On publication, new issues of Papers on Parliament are sent free of charge to subscribers on our mailing list. If you wish to be included on that mailing list, please contact the Research Section of the Department of the Senate at: Telephone: (02) 6277 3074 Email: [email protected] Printed copies of previous issues of Papers on Parliament may be provided on request if they are available. Past issues are available online at: www.aph.gov.au/pops Contents Richard Chaffey Baker and the Shaping of the Senate 1 Rosemary Laing Democracy before Dollars—the Problems with Money in Australian Politics and How to Fix Them 23 Joo-Cheong Tham The Senate—the Struggle Continues 39 Andrew Murray Enriching Democracy—Achievements of the Senate Crossbench and Backbench in the 45th Parliament 65 Maureen Weeks Wilkie v Commonwealth and Parliamentary Control of Appropriations 77 Glenn Ryall iii Contributors Rosemary Laing was Clerk of the Senate from 2009 to 2016. Initially joining as Director of Research, she spent 26 years in the Department of the Senate. Among her significant contributions to Senate scholarship, Dr Laing edited the 13th and 14th editions of Odgers’ Australian Senate Practice, and was editor and principal author of the Annotated Standing Orders of the Australian Senate. Joo-Cheong Tham is a Professor at the Melbourne Law School, whose research spans the fields of labour law and public law with a focus on law and democracy. Professor Tham is the author of Money and Politics: The Democracy We Can’t Afford and key reports on political funding and lobbying. Andrew Murray represented Western Australia in the Senate from 1996 to 2008, where he championed accountability, budgetary transparency and electoral reform. Having played a key role in Parliament’s investigation of children in institutional care, Mr Murray served as a Commissioner on the 2013–2017 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse. Maureen Weeks is the Deputy Clerk of the Senate. Prior to her appointment in 2017, Ms Weeks held a number of positions in the Department of the Senate, including as Clerk Assistant (Procedure), Clerk Assistant (Table) and Clerk Assistant (Committees). She has also occupied senior roles in the secretariat to the ACT Legislative Assembly. Glenn Ryall is a Committee Secretary in the Legislative Scrutiny Unit of the Department of the Senate. iv Richard Chaffey Baker and the Shaping Rosemary Laing of the Senate It was Harry Evans who first introduced me to Sir Richard Chaffey Baker—or ‘Dickie’ Baker as he fondly called him—the first President of the Australian Senate. Baker, though a native-born South Australian, had been educated at Eton, Cambridge and Lincoln’s Inn, but had gone on to be an influential delegate at the constitutional conventions of the 1890s, bucking the standard colonial obeisance to all things Westminster. Like Tasmanian Andrew Inglis Clark and a few others, Baker questioned the very rationale of the theory of responsible government while promoting something rather more republican in character, though always under the British Crown.1 When the Senate Department’s major Centenary of Federation project, the four-volume Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate, began to get off the ground in the early 1990s under the indefatigable editorship of Ann Millar, four sample entries were prepared to illustrate how the project could be done and what the entries would look like. An entry on Baker, researched and written by Dr Margot Kerley, was one of those four pilot entries. Perhaps it was a strategic choice given Harry Evans’ great interest in the subject, but Harry needed little convincing that this was a worthwhile contribution to the history of federation and he remained the dictionary’s strongest supporter, particularly at Senate estimates. Harry also read all entries, continuing to do so even after retiring, bringing to the task his great critical faculties and his unrivalled knowledge of Australian political history. He saved us from untold howlers. More notably, he contributed three magisterial introductions to the first three volumes published while he was Clerk, providing an historical overview of the periods covered by each volume. As retirement drew closer, Harry would sometimes talk about pursuing a full-length biography of Baker as a retirement project. Sadly, it was not to be but he had planted the seed of an idea. So this paper represents some first steps towards realising that This paper was presented at the annual Harry Evans Lecture at Parliament House, Canberra, on 19 October 2018. The Harry Evans Lecture commemorates the service to the Senate of the longest serving Clerk of the Senate, the late Harry Evans. It explores matters Harry Evans championed during his tenure as Clerk, including the importance of the Senate as an institution, the rights of individual senators and the value of parliamentary democracy. 1 For reflections on Baker as a republican, see Mark McKenna, ‘Sir Richard Chaffey Baker—the Senate’s First Republican,’ Papers on Parliament 30 (November 1997), www.aph.gov.au /About_Parliament/Senate/Powers_practice_n_procedures/~/~/link.aspx?_id=9D1C434B5DFB 4DEAB72D0DC53126B971&_z=z. 1 objective on his behalf. It provides an opportunity to express my gratitude to Harry Evans not only for everything he taught me but for contributing to keeping me out of trouble in my own retirement. I suspect our approaches would have differed quite markedly, but one of the joys of working with Harry was his tolerance of different approaches. The Journals of the Senate aside, he rarely insisted that something be done his way and only his way. In his introduction to the first volume of the Biographical Dictionary, Harry singled out Baker for his dogged but unsuccessful attempts during the conventions ‘to steer the Constitution away from the cabinet system of government…whereby the executive power is exercised by ministers dependent on the support of the lower house of the Parliament alone’. Baker favoured the Swiss style of federal government with a separately constituted executive government ‘no less accountable to one House than the other’.2 Although he lost that battle, he was determined that the Senate should strike out on its own to interpret its constitutional role free of unnecessary dependence on British models and traditions, all this despite his quintessentially British education. Although deeply conservative, Baker was a nationalist who did not regard what Harry Evans described as the ‘Westminster cringe’ as an essential element of his conservatism.3 Above all, Baker was a federalist. His strong belief that federation was in the interests of all the colonies overcame his adherence to a particular model of federalism and allowed him to live with the resulting compromise. He was sufficiently original and flexible in his thinking to cleave to a new, peculiarly Australian model of governance in which a Senate, representing the people of the states, was a critical element. Before there was a nation, he had a deep sense of the national interest, largely founded on the economic benefits to the colonies of free trade between them and of a uniform tariff. And we must recall that Baker had a significant economic stake in the national interest, with pastoral and mining interests across several states.4 He was a capitalist federalist. As a wealthy man and a South Australian to boot, he was fond of pointing out that he was the first native-born South Australian to achieve numerous offices.5 2 Ann Millar, ed., Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate, vol. 1, 1901–1929 (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2000), 2. 3 Ibid., 3. 4 For example, on two days in August and October 1881, he registered and paid just under 235 pounds per annum for 27 leases over nearly 10,000 square miles of the so-called ‘waste lands’ of the Crown, most of which were subsequently transferred to his company, the Musgrave Range and Northern Territory Pastoral Land Company Ltd. Records are held by the Darwin Office of the National Archives of Australia in series number E1652. 5 These included being the first South Australian-born member of both houses, minister, presiding officer, and recipient of Imperial decorations. 2 Richard Chaffey Baker At an operational level, as President, Baker steered the Senate’s standing orders, or operating rules, sufficiently away from the House of Commons bias of the Senate’s first Clerk, Edwin Gordon Blackmore, to equip this bold new institution to exercise unprecedented powers in the world of parliamentary government. He was able to do this because he brought to the role a huge reputation as a highly effective and even-handed chairman from his background as a long-serving President of the South Australian Legislative Council but, more importantly, as the Chairman of Committees of the 1897–98 Australasian Federal Convention which meant he conducted the detailed stages of the convention, as opposed to the debates in plenary. In that role he wrangled hundreds of amendments that had come out of the colonial parliaments’ earlier deliberations on the bill.6 At the end of the arduous final session of the convention in Melbourne, when the details of the Constitution Bill had been exhaustively considered, convention leader and future Prime Minister Edmund Barton commended Baker’s organisation of amendments in a very complex committee stage, and for ensuring all received a fair hearing and a vote.